Click on a row and scroll to display more details about the visit

Highclere Castle is a country house in the Jacobethan style, with a park designed by Capability Brown. The 5,000-acre estate is in Hampshire about 5 miles south of Newbury, Berkshire. It is the county seat of the Earl of Carnarvon, a branch of the Anglo-Welsh Herbert family.

Highclere Castle was a filming location for the British comedy series Jeeves and Wooster, which starred comedians Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry. It was also used as the main filming location for the award-winning period drama Downton Abbey. The great hall and some of the bedrooms located inside the building, were also used for filming.

ITV’s 2016 autumn drama “Tutankhamen”also has association with Highclere Castle, which, as the family seat of the Earls of Carnarvon, retains important links with the important archaeological discovery that is Tutankhamen.

A former wine cellar is now home to Highclere’s Egyptian collection that we will also have the opportunity to visit.

Included in this small exhibition are the family’s surviving items from the grave of the 19-year-old boy pharaoh, buried in Egypt some 3,300 years ago and rediscovered by the fifth Earl and the archaeologist Howard Carter in 1922.

They also have artefacts from other digs during the Earl’s time in Egypt in the early 20th century; cartouches, delightful figurines and a (thankfully) empty sarcophagus. Also there is “the very blade that killed him”; a century-old, ivory-handled cutthroat razor, the handle bearing the wyvern crest of the fifth Earl of Carnarvon, peer of the realm, and most prominent victim of the “Curse of Tutankhamen” – the ghastly fate reserved for anyone who should disturb the journey of the pharaoh through his afterlife.

It was with this razor that Carnarvon cut an inflamed mosquito bite while shaving, just after making the most important archaeological discovery of the 20th century.”